500 Days (45 page)

Blair expanded on his argument. The linkage was fundamental, and addressing it was vital to any success. But, to his frustration, Blair could tell that Bush didn’t buy it. The prime minister asked where the administration now stood in its strategy for Iraq.

“We don’t have a war plan set,” Bush said. “But I have set up a small cell at CENTCOM to do some planning and think through the various options. When they’ve done that, I’ll examine their suggestions.”

Blair again urged caution. If there were openings for resolving questions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction without going to war, they had to be pursued. A new initiative with the United Nations, he said, could be presented to Saddam as his last chance.

Bush didn’t have much faith in the U.N. approach. But, he said, he was no warmonger either. “If Saddam allows the U.N. inspectors in to do their work, unfettered,” he said, “that would mean adjusting our approach.”

The reverse, of course, also held, Blair said. If the peaceful, international route didn’t work, then a coalition had to be ready to act decisively to remove Saddam. But in preparation, they needed to pursue a public relations campaign that could address the growing international hostility against a military action. Bush agreed.

Blair went to bed that night feeling relieved. Bush, it seemed,
did
want to build a coalition of nations to work with the Americans on Iraq; he communicated none of Cheney’s disdain for such an approach. In fact, Blair mused, Bush seemed to tacitly distance himself from the hawks in his administration.

•  •  •  

The next morning, the sky over Crawford was black with thunderstorms, a welcome sight for the local farmers and ranchers who had been struggling through a dry spell.

At 9:30, just after breakfast, Bush, Blair, and their top aides gathered in the president’s office, a one-story building about half a mile from the main house. Bush, Andy Card, and Condoleezza Rice sat one side of the room; Blair, David Manning, and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, were across from them.

Bush and Blair gave an account of their discussion from the previous day. They were still in the stage of reviewing options, the men said. No final positions had been taken; nothing had been set in stone.

After that short briefing, Iraq was cast aside, and the group turned to the Middle East conflict. A conference call connected the group to Powell and Stephen Hadley, Rice’s deputy. General Anthony Zinni, who had been appointed by Bush as a special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, joined the call from Tel Aviv and described a meeting he had just had with the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. While Sharon insisted that Operation Defensive Shield would not end until the Palestinian terrorists had been routed, Zinni explained, he had agreed to allow the general into the West Bank so that he could meet with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority chairman.

For the rest of the morning, the British and American officials hashed over ideas for managing the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. Years later, critics would cite this meeting as the time when Bush and Blair agreed to invade Iraq. Not only was there no such deal; Iraq was not even the main topic of conversation.

•  •  •  

At about that same time, Frank Dunham Jr. was sitting at the breakfast table in a house on a dead-end street in Virginia Beach, reading a front-page article in the local newspaper.

U.S-BORN TALIBAN HELD IN NORFOLK
, the headline read. The piece reported that Yaser Hamdi had been seized in Afghanistan during a prison uprising, sent to Guantanamo, and then, when military officials determined he had been born in Baton Rouge, transferred to the United States.

What struck Dunham was that officials were not recognizing any of Hamdi’s basic rights as an American. He had no lawyer, and, at least according to the article, the Bush administration was holding him without pursuing criminal charges, as it had against John Walker Lindh.

That’s just wrong
, he thought.

Dunham knew that, as the head of the public defender’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, he would be getting involved in the case as soon as he returned to work on Monday. He had already taken up the defense of an accused terrorist, Zacarias Moussaoui. But in its treatment of Hamdi, the government seemed to be taking its stance toward captured jihadists in a troubling new direction. Moussaoui, a foreign national accused of involvement in the 9/11 plot, had been criminally charged and granted the constitutional rights afforded any defendant in an American court. Not this time.

Given that Hamdi was a citizen with no apparent links to the hijackings, Dunham would have expected him to be afforded at
least
the same rights as Moussaoui. And Lindh? The same people had arrested him on the same day in the same place under the same circumstances; he was in federal court, too. The unfairness of Hamdi’s fate seemed inescapable, and certainly looked bad—while the American son of a wealthy California family and the Frenchman were sent to civilian court, the American of Saudi descent who lived in the Middle East was locked up in a brig, uncharged.

Dunham had no compunction about stirring up this hornet’s nest. Even though he already represented an accused terrorist, no one could paint him as some wild-eyed radical. He was a conservative Republican who had served in the navy, a former federal prosecutor who had gone into private practice as
a defense lawyer in white-collar and military cases. Then he abandoned that lucrative career to be the federal public defender in the district, at half the pay. With meager resources, he had managed to assemble a group of lawyers for the office in little more than a year.

He had learned to make do with the basics. So that morning, he reached for a pad and pencil and began drafting a letter, seeking to represent Yaser Hamdi.

•  •  •  

At eleven o’clock that morning, Bush and Blair held a press conference inside the gymnasium at Crawford High School; any hope for meeting with reporters outdoors had been dashed by the torrential rain.

Both men gave opening statements summarizing the topics they had covered in their two days of talks—terrorism, the Middle East, weapons of mass destruction. They made no mention of Iraq.

Bush invited questions. The first two journalists asked about the Israeli incursions into the West Bank. Then Bush called on Adam Entous, a reporter from Reuters.

Had the problems in the Middle East threatened Bush’s effort to build a coalition for military action against Iraq? Entous asked. And had Bush convinced Blair that a military solution was necessary?

They had indeed talked about Iraq, Bush said. Both he and Blair agreed that Saddam Hussein was obligated under the years-old U.N. resolutions to prove he had no weapons of mass destruction.

“I explained to the prime minister that the policy of my government is the removal of Saddam and that all options are on the table,” Bush said.

He turned to Blair. Any sensible person, the prime minister said, would recognize that the region, the world, and the Iraqi people would be better off with Saddam out of power.

“This is a matter for considering all the options,” he said. “But a situation where he continues to be in breach of all the United Nations resolutions, refusing to allow us to assess, as the international community have demanded, whether and how he is developing these weapons of mass destruction—doing nothing in those circumstances is not an option, so we consider all the options available.”

The men sounded as if they were in agreement. They were open to trying anything that might rein in Saddam Hussein. And if diplomacy failed, then war could well be the only alternative.

•  •  •  

After returning to the ranch, a few of the British and American officials were chatting outside a bungalow. As they spoke, Bush’s dog, Barney, trotted over.

Bush motioned toward the dog. “This is my Leo,” he said.

Leo?
The prime minister’s son?

Alastair Campbell, a senior Blair aide, blurted out the thought that was on everyone’s mind

“Hold on,” he said. “Leo’s not a dog.”

Bush smiled. “Yes, I know,” he said. “But Barney’s the substitute for the little boy I never had.”

It was a charming moment, one that reinforced Campbell’s growing impression that Bush had evolved into a more confident leader. At press conferences, Campbell had sometimes winced at the president’s slouching posture and inartful delivery that seemed to reflect a lack of confidence. But today was different. Bush appeared energetic and self-assured. Everything in his demeanor, including his willingness to engage in lighthearted banter, proclaimed that the president had found not only his voice, but his purpose.

•  •  •  

That night before dinner, Campbell mentioned to Bush how serene he had seemed during the press conference. True, Bush said. Since the last time he had met with Blair, he said, he had changed his attitude about himself and his job.

“In the early days, I really got knocked when they put down the way I mangle words, and it really made me hesitant,” he said.

But now, Bush said, he had given up caring what the reporters thought about his verbal gaffes, and that made all the difference.

“The truth is, I have a limited vocabulary,” he said. “I’m not great with words, and I have to think about what I say very carefully.”

The two spoke for some time—about reporters, about Iraq—when Bush noticed that Campbell was one of the few in the room who wasn’t nursing a beer.

“Why aren’t you drinking?” Bush asked.

A shrug. “I’m a recovering drunk,” Campbell said.

Bush nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

“How much did you drink?”

“Well, two or three beers a day,” Bush said. “A bit of wine. Some bourbon. But I gave it up in August 1986.”

The two men compared their histories with alcohol. Bush’s drinking didn’t come close to matching Campbell’s daily binges.

“Having a breakdown and not drinking has been the best thing that ever happened to me,” Campbell said. “It was like seeing the light.”

Bush glanced at him quizzically. “But you still don’t believe in God?” he asked.

This was the second time that day the question had come up. In the morning, Campbell had fallen into a conversation with a woman in Bush’s e-mail prayer group who had asked if he had faith in God. She seemed to pity Campbell when he told her no. And he gave Bush the same answer.

At dinner, Bush and Campbell engaged in a spirited conversation about running. After the meal, Blair grabbed a guitar and started strumming and singing along with Daddy Rabbit, a band hired for the occassion. The evening ended with a few after-dinner toasts.

“All right, everyone can leave,” Bush announced, sounding jovial. “I want to go to bed.”

Pleasant though the evening had been, the British officials puzzled over one striking aspect of it—Bush seemed more at ease with them than he did with his own staff. The president’s aides showed great deference to him, Campbell said to Blair, but none of them kidded around with him. They didn’t seem to recognize that Bush had a touch of Austin Powers, the fictional—and goofy—secret agent from a series of movies.

“That’s why he seems to enjoy the banter with us,” Blair said. “He doesn’t seem to have anyone there who just has a laugh.”

•  •  •  

On April 15, Bruce Ivins carried a plastic test tube into his office at the army’s infectious disease research center in Fort Detrick. Standing beside his bookcase, he brought out a stick that looked like a Q-tip with a wooden handle. It was a sterile swab, often used to test for bacterial contamination in his anthrax lab.

Ivins swiped the swab across part of the bookcase, inserted it into the test tube, broke off the wooden handle, and pushed a cap onto the container. He wandered around the “cold side” of the lab—the portion where no tests of the bacteria are conducted—and swabbed other spots the same way.

The previous day, two researchers had spilled a negligible quantity of anthrax bacteria inside the hot suite. A quick decontamination was performed, the area was tested, and everything came back negative—no bacteria. But Ivins wasn’t satisfied. He went to his supervisor and demanded more samplings, this time on the cold side. His insistence puzzled the supervisor; there was no evidence—
indeed, no reason to believe—that there had been any contamination outside of the hot suite. She told Ivins he could not swab those areas without permission.

Flouting her instructions, he was now walking around the cold side taking samples in several areas including his office, the men’s changing room, and a lab technician’s desk. A number of the tests came back positive for anthrax.

But Ivins alerted no one. Instead, the next day, he did additional tests. Contamination turned up in even more spots, including multiple areas of his office, on an electrical box, and in the changing room. This time, he reported his findings to his supervisor, who was furious at his insubordination but duty-bound to order a comprehensive survey of Building 1425.

Out of twenty-two offices, only Ivins’s was contaminated. The women’s changing room was negative. The bacteria were found in three areas, all of them directly linked to Ivins. The test results were eventually turned over to the FBI agents conducting the anthrax investigation.

The details were striking. In total, 1,197 samples were obtained. Of those taken by Ivins, 27 percent yielded positive results, compared with 0.18 percent for those swabbed by others. In other words, Ivins’s swabs detected bacteria at a rate 15,000 percent higher than those conducted by colleagues. It was as if he knew exactly where to test.

•  •  •  

Frank Dunham’s first letter about Hamdi arrived by fax to the Norfolk Naval Base brig on April 17. It was addressed to William Paulette, the commanding officer of the military prison, and asked him to find out if Hamdi wanted to be represented by a lawyer. Dunham requested an immediate reply.

But Paulette was not authorized to contact anyone outside of the military about Hamdi. Instead, he forwarded the letter to the Combat Logistics Force, which shuffled it farther up the line to the Joint Forces Command. Paulette was ordered to ignore Dunham.